Life Expressed as Government Spending

In 2015, the Federal government spent 3.688 trillion dollars. How is anyone supposed to wrap their head around that amount money? Let’s compare government spending to activities around a day in a normal life and see if we can get some kind of handle on just how much of our money the government spends.

Let’s say that you just woke up from 8 hours of sleep. While you were sleeping the government spent 3.4 billion dollars. I can generally get ready for work in a half hour, but I also need 10 minutes to let the dogs out and feed them breakfast. Just that 10 minutes costs 70 million dollars.

My commute to work takes various times depending on traffic, but if the 11 miles to work were government spending it would be 77 million dollars. If I fill my car up with 15 gallons of government spending that is 105 million dollars. I went to the doctor today and my temp was 692 million, my blood pressure was 982 million over 561 million, and unfortunately my weight was 2.5 billion dollars.

Despite trying to put these extremely large numbers into context by using normal everyday activities, these hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars are not much easier to get a grasp on. The Pentagon has lost 6.5 trillion dollars, that’s over 2 years of Federal spending. Hillary Clinton didn’t do quite as bad, she only had 6 billion dollars unaccounted for. The problem with these massive numbers beyond the obvious, is that it is too easy for corruption and theft to go unnoticed.

If I wanted to embezzle money from the Federal government and decided to keep the amount at 1% in order to avoid detection, that would still be 36.8 billion dollars. If this isn’t reason enough to break up the power of the Federal government and divide most of this spending by 50 states, I don’t know what is.

But if there was anything that I wanted you to get from this column, it is this. The government is currently spending 7 million dollars a minute. When a President, any President, gets up and proudly declares that they will cut, not the debt which is at 19.9 trillion dollars, but the deficit, the amount we spend over what we take in, by 1 trillion over the next 10 years, please do the math. That’s 100 billion dollars a year for 10 years. That’s 14,286 minutes of spending. That’s 238 hours of spending. That is 10 days of spending. Don’t let the politicians have this kind of power over us, and especially don’t let them use extremely large number to fool us into thinking that they have cut any spending.

Charles Hagerman is married with two daughters. He spend a great deal of time listening to music, and watching tv and movies. Most conversations with him will feature many movie quotes, and him breaking out into song. Having taught himself to pay guitar using the internet, he plays guitar at his church. Additionally, Charles is a self taught programmer, studies economics and various languages using the internet. He is a tireless defender of liberty.